Summer Summary

Like the protagonist in Ethan Frome, Wharton's most widely read novel today, Charity yearns for a fuller life than the one she lives in her small town, but social restrictions and a certain weakness of character prevent her from realizing her dreams. One of the first American literary novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, Summer begins with a chance encounter, has a passionate affair at its center, and ends...

Edith Wharton Biographies (8)

The breadth of Edith Wharton's achievement makes definition of her place in literary history difficult. For fifty years she wrote prolifically, and her audience ranged from scholars to readers of popu...
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Perhaps the most striking thing about Edith Wharton 's reputation as a novelist is the fact that she has been "reclaimed" so many times. This fact seems all the more remarkable when one reflects that...
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While at the close of her career Edith Wharton was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristocrat whose fiction about people of high social standing had little to tell about the masses, particul...
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Although Edith Wharton is better known as a novelist than a short-story writer, she was in fact writing and publishing stories well before her debut as a novelist in 1902. Her first published story ...
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Henry James observed in an August 1902 letter to Edith Wharton's sister-in-law, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, that Wharton "must be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New Y...
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Edith Wharton (1861-1937), American author, chronicled the life of affluent Americans between the Civil War and World War I.Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City, probably on Jan...
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During the early decades of the twentieth century--at a time when New York City could ban women from smoking in public--one American woman published works which discussed love outside of marriage, sca...
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Biography EssayWhile at the close of her career Edith Wharton was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristocrat whose fiction about people of high social standing had little to tell about the mas...
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